Today's financial online trading evolved over the last 10 years from traditional brokerage houses. With the rapid development and popularity of the internet, growth of electronic online trading has been extraordinary. Nevertheless the interface of the various trading platforms has generally remained unchanged over the last years and relies for the most part on the same tools that have been available in an offline format. Some on-line trading also incorporates several technical analytical tools that are generally displayed upon a simple time-line price/volume graph. Some research advancements have been made in the field of visualizing stock market data, but to this date none of it has had significant impact on the way trading works.
Speculative day trading represents a significant share of the whole trading industry. The online trading market offers various financial instruments such as stocks, foreign exchange, bonds and long-term securities and various forms of option trading. Each of these tools has several multi-billion market leaders (e.g., E-trade, Ameritrade®, Charles Schwab®, etc.).
On-line trading platforms offer the users exact financial information on securities or derivatives and tools to create specific transactions upon the underlying security. These tools are generally implemented as dynamic Web-sites or downloadable software.
The transactions are in the form of buy/sell orders related to a specific security that the user queries, and can have several purely financial parameters such as stop/loss, margin, short sell etc.
The foreign exchange market (also called “forex”) is the largest and most dynamic market. Nearly 1.8 Trillion dollars are traded everyday. In the foreign exchange market, the on-line retail brokers have been increasing market share in the overall daily turnover.
Forex brokers are firms that deal in foreign exchange. The foreign exchange market is quite similar to the equity markets, except that typical forex brokers do not charge a commission and are required to hold a special license. Forex brokers earn money from the spread (also called “pip”). The spread is the difference between the prices at which a currency is bought and sold. A pip is the smallest price increment in a currency. For example, in Euro/US Dollar (EUR/USD), a move from 0.9008 to 0.9009 is one pip. In US Dollar/Japanese Yen (USD/JPY), a move from 127.41 to 127.42 is one pip. Several leading foreign exchange brokers also offer software interfaces to automate trading, including ONADA and Gain capital.
Today's online gaming industry has arisen mostly in the last 5 years. The gaming industry is divided into several market segments:                1. Classic casino games such as roulette, slot machines, black jack, etc. (i.e.—Market Leader Casino-on-net, www.888.com)        2. Betting on various sport events.        3. Skilled and semi-skilled games such as Poker, chess and backgammon; (i.e.—Market Leader PartyGaming)        4. New games.        
On-line Casino games offer the user the opportunity to play a game over the Internet. The user interface consists of games such as horse racing, slot machines, roulette and card games. All these games depend on random variables (excluding sport betting). The user can play the game and the game outcome will be determined using a computer based algorithm to select a random outcome of the game. The algorithm (also known as Random Numbers Generator) usually has fixed odds to determine the Payoff of the gamer (and the gain of the house). For example, the slot machines algorithm can determine that the overall return to gamers will be 95% of all the bets, so the house will earn 5% of all the bets.
The graphic user interface (GUI) of these games does not necessarily depend on the random algorithm or the game outcome. For example a roll of the dice can be in a fixed manner, where only the last frame of the dice roll will represent the outcome of the random algorithm.
Although both the gaming and the trading industry rely in part on speculation, they hold uniquely different characteristics:                1. Trading companies are regulated and require licensing, while on-line gaming and betting have legal issues in some countries and are considered gambling.        2. Most on-line trading applications have sophisticated usability and a standard user interface mainly for informing the user of price changes, while the on-line gaming applications are rich in color, innovative formats and complex graphics.        3. Online Games have short-time durations, often less than 5 minutes per game, while on-line trading provide for longer durations and a position that can be held for an unlimited time.        4. The marketing efforts and client target segments also differ. The trading companies target and reach a financially educated audience (Day traders) and compete over trading costs and user functionality. The gaming industry aims at the less educated, addictive audience.        
Several companies offer the ability to place bets on the outcome of different financial instruments, often referred to as financial spread/binary betting. Financial Spread betting gives investors the opportunity to trade on the financial markets without ever taking physical ownership of the underlying instrument. This means that the trader can speculate in the direction of any financial instrument, whether it is specific shares, currencies, commodities or indices without ever owning them. For example a trader can place a bet of $10 per point on the NASDAQ, and the bet is settled as the difference between the purchase and the sell price multiplied by $10. Most of these companies operate mainly in the UK, and are considered betting companies. In the US there is no regulation for betting companies. The user interface of these instruments is similar to on-line trading, mostly based on dynamic web-pages and has an informative look.
The present invention recognizes the similarities between the online gaming and the online trading industries, and addresses the need of users for simpler and more appealing graphic representation of the financial information.
The present invention also addresses the legal issues of the on-line gaming industry, and offers gamers a regulated financial alternative for their gaming needs.